Women's & Gender Studies

What is Women's & Gender Studies?

The field of Women's & Gender Studies expands a student’s intellectual vision and capacity to identify and resolve problems. We challenge the traditional disciplines while developing and integrating new bodies of knowledge.

Recognizing that a neglect of women, gender, and sexuality in most of the established disciplines has led to an inadequate and incomplete understanding of human experience, Women's & Gender Studies is committed to an intensive exploration of the impact and strength of difference and diversity in women's and men’s lives.

Our program is committed to a multi-cultural and global understanding of people. All courses are interdisciplinary and each considers the complex dynamics among race, ethnicity, locality, class, gender, and sexuality.

Critical thinking, analysis, and the development of expertise in writing, research and presentations provide Women's & Gender Studies graduates with the professional skills needed to pursue their future careers or further graduate study.

Graduates with a Women's & Gender Studies major will be prepared to enter the full range of graduate, professional, and specialist service programs open to liberal arts and sciences graduates. In addition, this major provides a sound background of skills and understanding relevant to work in a variety of fields valuable to the community, such as counseling, health, education, welfare, as well as key areas of business, human resources management, public relations, advertising, mass media, the arts, civil service, and international aid organizations. A useful book is Women's Studies Graduates: The First Generation written by Barbara F. Luebke and Mary Ellen Reilly, New York: Teacher's College Press, 1995, available in Schurz Library.

Newsletter

Our first Women's and Gender Studies newsletter is now available here.